Ethical leadership and organizational commitment: The roles of ethical culture and trust through PLS-SEM, NCA, and fuzzy TOPSIS

This study investigates how ethical leadership influences organizational commitment, with a focus on the mediating role of ethical culture and the moderating effect of employee trust. Using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM), the analysis confirms that ethical leadership positively shapes ethical culture, which in turn enhances organizational commitment, and that employee trust moderates these associations by strengthening or weakening their effects. To identify the minimum levels required for these variables to generate meaningful outcomes, Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA) was applied, revealing that ethical leadership, ethical culture, and employee trust must exceed specific threshold values for commitment to emerge, thus highlighting their role as necessary but non-sufficient conditions. Additionally, a Fuzzy TOPSIS approach was used to prioritize organizational strategies that strengthen ethical norms and trust, providing a ranked assessment of interventions based on expert judgment and multi-criteria evaluation. By clearly distinguishing between associational effects (SEM), necessary conditions (NCA), and strategic prioritization (TOPSIS), this study offers an integrated understanding of how ethical leadership operates within public organizations. The findings demonstrate that beyond identifying statistically significant relationships, it is also crucial to determine which factors are essential and which interventions should be prioritized to effectively sustain organizational commitment.